When Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront Hotel posted an ad for unpaid interns to work busing tables in its dining room (“As a Busperson, you will take pride in the integral role you play in supporting your Food and Beverage Colleagues…”) it quickly set off a firestorm in social media — and an uneasy silence elsewhere.

[np_storybar title=”Robyn Urback: Down with unpaid internships” link=”http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/06/18/robyn-urback-down-with-unpaid-internships/”%5D Imagine, for a moment, that McDonald’s restaurants across Canada began introducing unpaid internship programs. Geared to the aspiring hospitality manager, these programs would promise intangible windfalls such as “exposure” and “connections” (and maybe a free visor) in exchange for 40 hours at the cash register and behind the deep fryer.

Lasting anywhere from weeks to months, McDonald’s would cycle through one roster of unpaid employees to the next, bidding farewell to expended interns with little more than a hearty handshake and an extra line to put on their resumes.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But this sort of thing happens all the time — not at fast food restaurants, mind you — but at ad agencies, media outlets and other corporate offices across Canada and beyond.

Sensing a PR debacle in the making, the hotel quickly took down the ad. Unpaid internships have become a sensitive issue, the subject of lawsuits in both the U.S. and Canada from former interns demanding to be paid for the work they had done. To many of the commenters flaming the hotel online, the practice was clearly barbaric, a throwback to the days of child labour or worse. “At least the chimneysweeps got paid” seemed to be the general sentiment.

Yet walk into any media outlet, MP’s office, or NGO, the kinds of folks who usually get up in arms about this sort of thing, and chances are you will find an unpaid intern or three performing some menial task. And not only there. Hard data is scarce, but rough estimates of the number of unpaid interns run into the hundreds of thousands.

That has critics, at least the ones who aren’t hiring them themselves, cranking up the rhetoric. When a Tory Senator advertised for an unpaid intern, he was accused of “slapping young Canadians in the face.” According to Andrew Langille, a Toronto labour lawyer, “the message to youth is: you’re worthless, you aren’t deserving of a wage, and I can exploit you with impunity.” A writer for iPolitics calls interns the “new Canadian underclass.”

Why employers would be so eager to make use of them is not hard to fathom. Theoretically the employer is not supposed to derive any benefit from taking them on — they’re supposed to be training, not doing work that could be done by paid employees — at least in the three provinces that regulate the practice. But who’s kidding whom?

What’s harder to explain is why the kids accept the offers. The easy answer (it’s exploitation, innit?) seems harder to apply in a case where the pay is not low, but zero. People may be hard up enough for cash to take a lousy, low-wage job — it’s better than nothing, after all — but when the pay is not, in fact, better than nothing, why not just stay home? Plainly they must feel they are getting something in return: not as much as they’d like, but enough to make it worth their time.

This is hardly unusual. Every job offers some mix of monetary and non-monetary returns: not only the pay and benefits, but the experience gained, the satisfaction of doing interesting work, and so on. A young person must consider which is the best investment of their time. Some jobs offer good wages, but little in the way of marketable skills or experience: what economists, in their bloodless way, call “human capital.” Others offer the opposite mix. Unpaid internships, and the on-the-job training they are supposed to provide, are the job equivalent of a small-cap growth stock — no dividends, but the promise of heady capital gains in future.

That, indeed, is the problem. As with growth stocks, you’re essentially making a bet. With a paying job, you know what the return is up front. With an internship, you don’t know until you get into the job — and often not until long after — whether the experience gained is worth it. So critics are right, at the least, to be concerned that companies not misrepresent the nature of the work.

Whether anything more should be done about it, however, is not as clear. The line between “work experience” and mere “work” is not easily drawn, nor would there seem much good achieved by preventing young people, properly informed, from accepting unpaid work. If it is exploitation for a young journalist, say, to write and edit stories without pay, what is it called when they pay a journalism school for the chance to do much the same?

The argument that unpaid internships are inherently exploitative is also hard to square with the other criticism they commonly attract: that only the children of well-to-do parents can afford to take them. (The food in this restaurant is terrible! And such small portions!) The same is true, of course, of higher education — for children from poorer families, the time taken off work, and the forgone income this represents, presents a far greater barrier than it does for rich kids. This is not generally considered an argument against higher education, notwithstanding that it is disproportionately the children of the rich who take advantage of it. Indeed, the bulk of progressive opinion holds that it should be subsidized.

Still, if internships are a benefit to which we should wish to expand access — and not a Dickensian relic we should wish to ban — the example of higher education may suggest a remedy. The most promising reform of student assistance would replace the present system of student loans, which must be repaid on a fixed schedule regardless of income, with one in which repayment is based on a share of the graduate’s future earnings.

Essentially this amounts to taking an equity stake in the student’s human capital. Could young workers likewise be staked the funds to support them while they are acquring experience in unpaid internships?